Category: General

Why do programmers work at night? – Gtd

Why do programmers work at night? – Gtd. Very very true.

My heart bleeds for Karen Gee…

School maths causes pain – Sydney Morning Herald

The woman featured in this story is complaining about high education costs, and wishes that the government could contribute more. My heart bleeds for her – at about 5.25 litres/minute. Seriously, hasn’t she got better things to whinge about?

Let’s actually put some numbers on this, and see what exactly she’s complaining about.

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Leveraged Buyouts – what a crock

When you borrow money to buy something, it’s not uncommon for the thing you bought to be used as collateral for the loan. The obvious example is a house mortgage – you borrow money, the house is the security. This makes the act of borrowing itself reasonably risk free: if the purchase falls through, the loan is dissolved and all you’re out is some administrative fees. Your real risk starts when the purchase is successful.

TL;DR – Borrowing money to buy a house is to leveraged buyouts as a pat on the cheek is to a punch to the testicles; same general act, very different implications.

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Goals for 2012

Each year, I make exactly one New Year’s resolution: only make one resolution. I’ve been doing that for five years, and I have a 100% success rate.

But I do make goals. The difference between a goal and a resolution is that with a resolution, as soon as you break it, it’s gone. But a goal is something you work towards, and you measure yourself not with the binary of achieved/failed, but by the progress and effort you make along the way.

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My Book Collection

Well, the technical ones, anyway – not shown are the two other similarly sized bookcases – and the other one which is a little more than twice as big – which are overflowing with my fiction collection.

(Click to embiggen)

The bottom two shelves (and a couple in the third row) are very dated – I don’t think anyone cares about the pre-OS7 Macintosh Toolbox anymore, for example. A number of the books in that row are from my university days.

The next three rows (including the slight spill over to the top row, which will soon force me to relocate the DVDs) are a more recent vintage – those are the books that I kept at work while I procrastinated about unpacking my study (Hey, I only moved in just under two years ago!). But I finally did that on the weekend, and now they’re home (except for a few I’ve lent out)

I gotta say, I’m thankful for ebooks – over the last two years, I’ve predominately bought ebooks. I’m not sure I could get their physical versions on the top shelf even without the DVDs (it would be another 24 books or so).

Anyway, the reason I’m posting this isn’t to brag or anything – it’s to set myself a challenge. I haven’t been keeping up with my reading over the last year for a number of reasons, up to and including battling with a moderate case of depression. I’m going to change that though – I’m going to go through those top shelves and re-read (or, in a few cases, read) each on that’s still relevant – which is most of them. I mean, I’m sure Webwork In Action was great in the day, but Webwork isn’t relevant to me anymore. Age isn’t a factor, though – in that bookcase somewhere is a 2nd-printing copy of The Mythical Man Month (which I picked up in a Lifeline store for $5!), and I’ve got both the original and the re-issue version of Peopleware in there. Then there’s the Psychology of Computer Programming – but that’s from the 20th anniversary printing.

Anyway, my challenge – to myself – will be to read and post a review of the books in there. One a week, with the first review due next Saturday (October 1), with an e-book thrown into the mix every so often as well. I’ll post a full set of the books within the next few days, and I’ll even see if I can turn it into a poll of sorts in case there’s books people want me to review first.

Watch this space for more.

Updated: You can see my Delicious Library collection, or you can view the page that will become a dynamic view over my books (but right now is just static)

Carbon Tax Thoughts – “That’s not a tax – it’s an ETS”

What a lot of people haven’t seemed to understand about the carbon tax is that it’s not a tax. It’s actually a way to transition from a “pollute-all-you-want” model to a capped-permit model – the ETS.

In order for an ETS to work, you need to have permits to pollute, issued by the government at a price. In order to developed a market for the permits (the ‘T’ stands for trading, after all), you need to have a finite number of these permits, so that companies can sell the permits that they don’t need. You also need penalties for the people who pollute without the permits.

The ‘carbon tax’ is an introduction of a uncapped permit scheme. With no upper limit on the number of permits, there’s no secondary market, but what this does do is help the government work out how many permits are required. Then, in 2015, the government is going to limit the number of permits it issues each year. Companies will still be able to buy them from the government – until the permits run out. After that, they can either buy them from the general market, OR pay the fine for polluting without a permit (this will set an upper-cap on the market price).

Labelling it a carbon tax is largely an exercise in both smear politics and lazy journalism (and it doesn’t help that the politicians have accepted the term ‘carbon tax’ as a moniker).

For a summary – in the government’s own words – see the Clean Energy Future site.

Two weeks with Twitter…

A little over two weeks ago, I succumbed and decided to see exactly what the deal with twitter was. It just didn’t seem like a wonderful tool – SMS for the web? Really? But, in the spirit of inquiry, I thought I’d give it ago. Now, a bit over two weeks later, I can say “I’m glad”.
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Warning: get off housing gravy train – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

There’s an opinion page on the ABC News page about the increasing rise in house prices (and the subsequent fall in housing affordability). The solution presented: build more housing (not necessarily houses – apartments are okay too), thus increasing the supply. Unfortunately, that won’t help.
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Wage growth does not automatically equate to inflationary pressure…

One of my coworkers tossed out this line today: “We can’t just increase the minimum wage, because that would cause inflation”. I said at the time that didn’t have to be the case, and I just thought I’d capture my reasoning in writing.
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